This post has been brewing in my brain all year. I guess I was sort of waiting for a specific moment of inspiration or insight to commit it to an essay, but since my task was to contemplate what it means, not figure out what it means (both for me and in general), I’m going to share some places my year-long project for Hel has taken me.

This simple statement – It’s Not About the People – has been one hell of a koan-like puzzle for me. And merely sitting with my confusion, rather than trying to find my way out, taught me the first of many lessons that I have since tried to apply to my life.

Lesson One: Your Job is not to make people happy, or tell them what they want to hear, or do things for them so that they will like you.

I will admit, I am a people pleaser. Growing up, I compensated for my lack of charisma and attraction by being the friend who makes you happy. If you need to laugh, I have funny jokes and stories. If you need someone to help you move, I was there and brought three friends. If you need a rare-edition book for your master’s thesis, I will devote time and energy to find it. Nowadays, I joke about my “magickal rolodex” being my superpower, in that I know such a diverse number of people who also have a wide range of skills, collections, and interests, that no matter what you might need in your life, I probably know someone who has it or can help you do it or someone who will do it for you.

But these things carry a price, something that I have to stop ignoring and come to terms with. As I am losing mobility, having fewer and fewer good spoon days, and my resources are dwindling, I just cannot afford to be all things to all people. Sometimes I can’t even afford to be one thing to the right person – looking at some of my recently failed relationships, it’s obvious to me that there were parts where I just didn’t show up and engage enough. And I’m not deluding myself into thinking that it’s all related to my physical health – I’ve been pretty depressed this year and sometimes my ability to engage with others was extremely limited because of my depression. I am taking steps to at least face how bad my depression has gotten, but right now I don’t see an immediate burst of sunshine on the horizon. My counselor reminds me that sometimes the true observation is “Things fucking suck right now.”

As I explored this facet of the koan, I really began in earnest to think about and enact some much-needed boundaries in my life. There were definitely areas that were sapping my resources fast and dirty, and it will not surprise you that most of those areas reacted with the biggest and more painful responses when I tried to stifle the flow a little. There were some people/places/things that had come to expect me to jump when they called, to never ask for compensation for my time and efforts (and in some cases, even refusing to reimburse me for monetary investments). It has cost me at least one friendship, which broke my heart. But at the same time, it gave me an intense sense of clarity as to how some people define what it means to be a friend – that for some, if you’re not actively adding benefit to their life in a tangible way, you’re not worth a phone call or email once in a while.

I also had to turn this part inside out, and I will admit that I am still a work in progress on this. I had to look at how I deal with the vast amount of relationships (not just romantic/sexual, but all different kinds) I consider important and detail to myself what levels of effort these relationships need. The obvious example is my relationship with email – I have a reputation of never answering my email, or not answering it in a timely fashion. I tend to hide behind physical excuses, although they are sometimes legitimate, about my inability to sit and type for long periods of time. (I have tried dictation, but it doesn’t work as well for reasons that I won’t get into.) But I’d be a big fat liar if I said that was the only, or even the most common reason why I don’t respond to emails, return phone calls, or other forms of communication. I did a lot of meditating on the whys and wherefores about this, and two flaws I have decided to work on. One is feeling overwhelmed too easily. It would be embarrassing for me to admit how small a day’s itinerary can be before I throw my hands up and freak out. Like most people, I have days when I am more or less productive, but the days I am less productive have become to far outweigh the more productive ones.

Part of that is a honest coming to terms with how much actual energy I have on an average day. Although most people have days where they plan much more than they can actually accomplish, that has become almost a daily occurence for me. I’m either wildly optimistic about how much I can do, or I’m overly pessimistic and do very little. The problem becomes that there are rarely days where I land somewhere in the middle – once I fail to accomplish one or two tasks, I throw in the towel and spend the rest of the day goofing off. It also has the effect of beating myself up over stuff I failed to accomplish, as well as a slowly increasing backlog that becomes really overwhelming (vs. my anxiety driven feelings of overwhelm, which may or may not relate to the actual amount of stuff I’m supposed to be doing).

This leaves me in a pretty obvious quandry: If I make “make people happy” or it’s corollary, “Do things so people will like you”, my first priority; but I am coming to stark terms about exactly how much I can expect to accomplish on a regular basis – something has to give. And although in a dream world the solution would be to find the power-up magic pills in my real-life video game and suddenly have more stamina/less pain; the harsh reality in my real-life documentary is that I can’t always make people happy if their happiness is contingent on me keeping up with correspondence or doing other forms of work (especially for free – but that’s less about money and more about reciprocity).

Hel comes to remind me, or maybe just school me, that my first and most important priority is serving the Gods, and the work that They ask of me. So learning how to create better boundaries and knowing my limitations when it comes to “the people”, helps me be a better shaman and God-employee because They get my best. Many, if not all, the people in my life give lip service to understanding this, but I can probably count on fingers how many really grok how that has transformed my life. It has been difficult, because obviously what I would like to do with my life and my time is sometimes at direct odds with what They want from me. And in some cases, I have been tasked with doing the same thing over and over again until something happens (that is outside my control), and it feels downright wrong to spend time on something that has a high chance of being shoved back in my face, rather than spend time answering email and being social. But this is only one of the harsh realities of the price I paid to live in December, that although I had already forfeited my Will to Loki, that the deal with Hel included forfeiting most of my Life. This is compounded by the other, less obvious “benefit” that I have several Divine Bosses, and even a few that just Boss Me Around, and the tangible web/chains of the many oaths and Relationships I have developed over time has made me very circumspect about my own cavalier attitude I once held about accepting the offer of Whatever God Showed Interest, rather than really sitting and figuring out if I had the time and energy I would be asked for.

In short, I started acting with the Gods the way I acted with my schoolmates when I was in Junior High School. I didn’t care if you were a Jock, a Prep, a Freak, a Stoner, a Bad Kid – if you showed me the least amount of attention, I would do almost anything you asked as long as you continued to be my friend. I mean, I had more than one person say, to my face, that they really liked being my friend but they didn’t want the people at school to know (because then they would become secondary targets to the teasing/torture I got on a regular basis), and made me agree to keep our friendship a secret. I am not quite so desperate when it comes to Gods, but I know people who have been, and continue to be so. They are just so happy that Someone, Anyone is paying them attention, that they don’t really think through what the consequences might be. Loki may be showing you some attention, but don’t come crying to me if your life gets completely upended and you can’t seem to make heads or tails of anything anymore – invite a God of Eternal Change into you life, you get exactly what’s on the tin. Odin may propose marriage to you, which sounds romantic and important and satisfying, until you learn that He wants you to abstain from human relationships, or decides that you should quit your only-means-of-financial-support job and travel around the country helping the homeless and doing ritual for Him. There are lots of stories like this, and they tend to be the stories that you don’t find on the Internet – they are the ones told around campfires, or after rituals, or during pastoral care sessions.

This is where lesson 1 bleeds into lesson 2, so I will let you know what lesson 2 is as foreshadowing for my next essay:

Being a shaman means that you work for the Gods, not for your clients.

2 Comments

I am on that teeter totter of life as well…it is a wyld ride of exhaustion and exuberance.
I am not wanting to get off quite yet. I like the conflict at times. Other times I sit out in the backyard watching the fire wondering what I did to deserve this pain and heartache.